The exchange of experience between schools, adult education and voluntary organisations, ethnic minority centres, universities and companies should provide insight into learning needs in this area.

The exchange of experience between schools, adult education and voluntary organisations, ethnic minority centres, universities and companies should provide insight into learning needs in this area.

Calls on the Commission and the Member States to ensure that the e-Learning initiative gives absolute priority to integrating the information technologies in school curricula, by means of teaching methods that use the new technologies; considers that teaching centres will be responsible for developing the content of the new school curricula, thus providing a higher standard of excellence and competition between centres;

a broad-based skills offensive should be launched ('Europe's youth into the digital age'), in particular to counteract the skills shortage in Europe; Parliament expects the Commission to draw up specific proposals such as educating pupils for pupils or class trips to IT training establishments; however, since there is no EU competence such proposals must be formulated in a non-binding way since educational policy is, in the final analysis, the responsibility of the Member States;

Special attention should be paid to developing where appropriate multimedia support centres within the Member States, and to communication between teachers and education partners, and to training in its broadest sense, - take steps to: = experiment, in the context of working out and encouraging flexible patterns of school or university organization, their integration with the information and communication technologies, in order to increase their effectiveness and dissemination, = ensure equal opportunities in access to the benefits of ...[+++] multimedia technologies for personal and professional development, and favour their use in rural areas or those suffering from industrial decline, = experiment with the use of these new tools to fight against social exclusion and scholastic failure, - encourage the evaluation and dissemination of best teaching practices based on experiments and on the use of multimedia educational software and services, spread the information on products and services and consider locally the establishment or consolidation of demonstration and promotion fora on this basis, - seek out the most efficient management methods for coordinated actions between cultural, educational and training programmes and research programmes, taking account of the opportunities offered by the appropriate Community instruments.

Centred on schools (there are more than 300 000 pre-school, primary and secondary education establishments in the Community), which are one of the main places for exchanges and contacts between the various people involved in education, and implemented by means of projects and transnational cooperation networks, Community measures in the field of education could be based on the following points: - encouraging cooperation between education establishments by means of, for example, mobility and exchanges of young people, providing them with the opportunity to encounter different environments; - making teachers and other people involved in education more aware of the European dimens ...[+++]ion in education during their training and, to this end, encouraging cooperation and exchanges between training institutes in different Member States; - developing language teaching, thereby increasing mobility vis-à-vis other countries and the possibility of communicating with other cultures, strengthening Community action to this end on the basis of experience acquired through the Lingua programme, and encouraging the development of teaching materials; - encouraging greater exploitation of the possibilities offered by distance education and multimedia systems to help young people adapt to occupational developments or, where necessary, retraining, and facilitating the transfer of knowledge; - promoting educational innovations and their dissemination by encouraging the establishment at European level of networks of researchers into education and training requirements and methodologies; provisions to this end are set out in the proposal for the fourth framework programme of Community activities in the field of research and technological development; - strengthening exchanges of information and experience relating to the education systems and methodologies of Member States, their reforms and innovations, and thereby profiting from the considerable knowledge acquired through the work of the ...